Yeats’s interest in Berkeley developed in the 1920s in the context of his appointment to the Irish senate, where he saw himself as a spokesman for the old Protestant previously largely Unionist ascendancy caste. In this context he built up a mythological history of the Protestant ascendancy which bore as much resemblance to the original as his accounts of the Irish peasantry written in the late nineteenth century bore to the reality of the life of the rural poor.

Post-Good Friday Agreement rhetoric about the historic “symbiotic bond” between Ireland and England presupposes that both parties were equal beneficiaries of this supposed symbiosis and can lead imperceptibly to a blurring of the conflict, violence, trauma and catastrophe involved in this long relationship.